"Life's most persistent and urgent question is, "What are you doing for others?'" - MLK Jr.

The Great Barrington Du Bois Legacy Committee and Multicultural BRIDGE invite Berkshire residents of all ages* to join together in a morning of service to honor of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We will meet at the First Congregational Church in Great Barrington by 9:00 am and head out to volunteer activities.

Afterward, we will convene for a traditional interfaith celebration at 12:00 pm, followed by refreshments & community conversation at 1:00pm. (The MLK celebration service is open to all, not just volunteers, so please come for whatever portion of the day you can!)

*Please note that this is a family-friendly event, but children should be accompanied by an adult.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the social revolution of black intimate life that occurred in the black quarters of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, serial partners, queer relations, cohabitation outside of wedlock and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life. In wrestling with the question, “What is a free life?” young black women created forms of intimacy and kinship indifferent to the dictates of respectability, and outside the bounds of law. They cleaved to and cast off lovers, exchanged sex to subsist, and revised the meaning of marriage. Longing and desire fueled their experiments in how-to-live. They refused to labor like slaves or to accept degrading conditions of work. Beautifully written, Wayward Lives narrates the story of this radical transformation of black intimate and social life. It recreates the experience of young black women who wanted an existence qualitatively different than the one that had been scripted for them, and, for the first time, credits them with shaping a cultural movement that transformed the urban landscape. Through a melding of history and literary imagination, Wayward Lives recovers their radical aspirations and insurgent desires. [Hartman narrates the story of this radical transformation of black intimate and social life against the grain of the prevailing century-old argument about the crisis of the black family.]

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route and Scenes of Subjection. She a Guggenheim fellow and has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. She is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and lives in New York.

​She will be in dialogue with Tera W. Hunter, professor of African American Studies at Princeton.
Date: March 2nd, 2019 3pm - 5pm
Location: The Mount​